


Melt

by ziegler



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: (kind of), Angst, Exes, F/F, Friends With Benefits, Mentions of Sex, Moicy, Moircy, One Shot, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-04
Updated: 2018-04-04
Packaged: 2019-04-18 11:50:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14212536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ziegler/pseuds/ziegler
Summary: We must all make sacrifices in the name of science.





	Melt

Moira O’Deorain was never one to find that she lost sleep. Or at least, she never used to be.

Moira always made a point of limiting herself to three things – good food, good mind, and good rest. She always _used_ to have a good night’s rest, back when she was a little younger; when she wasn’t working a constant overtime in Talon’s laboratories, and especially when she’d finished something big that she _was_ working on. But with the same thought running over and over her mind, she didn’t remember the last time she’d been able to close her eyes for more than four hours a time.

“The state of you…” she mumbled to herself; the reflection of her face in the mirror almost a little too shocking for her liking. “What have you let that woman do to you?”

The dark marks beneath the eyes. The not eating. The uncharacteristic, lovelorn hole in her heart.

It was beginning to get grating.

Moira found herself even more irritable than usual, after everything that had happened. Her cool, calm demeanour had faded. Where she once would have produced a smug air, she now produced vitriol. She began snapping at the off-hand assistants that Talon brought in occasionally, swept away by her ideals of pushing the boundaries of science; they often left with a bad taste in their mouth, singing the mantra of ‘never meet your idols’ to the press interested in Talon’s dirty deeds, and certainly to the former members of Overwatch.

Moira grumbled as she thought on the subject of the latter. After all, it was no secret to her that Overwatch had reformed. If anything, it was underground global news, and that was something that had thoroughly bent the Talon bosses all out of shape. Naturally, those in the lower down rungs – anything below a commanding officer – got the worst of the brunt. For herself, for Reaper, and for her most successful project in Amelie Lacroix, they got the brunt of the burns from the top brass. _More experiments, more developments,_ they barked from up high. Moira always scoffed at how they conveniently forgot that their two best agents were products of her design.

But to top it all off; to top off the stress at work, the lack of freedom and the misbegotten ways of being judged; the woman that she had fallen so in love with – a doctor by the name of Angela Ziegler – was now the head of medical research in numerous facilities across the globe. The head of medicine in Overwatch, even.

Moira felt her own mouth sour with a bad taste.

That was always the description for Angela she wanted to give. A bad taste. A taste that Moira just couldn’t get off her tongue, no matter how many makeshift methods she’d tried. Staying up too late and drowning in her work; sleeping with other women who were already enamoured with her; drinking herself into stupors, god, anything. Even experimenting with Talon-brand anaesthetics, just to numb the sensation for a while. It didn’t matter if she had to sit in her seat vacantly for three hours. Anything just to switch off this feeling.

“This is hopeless,” Moira mumbled angrily to herself, almost after every time she’d tried and failed to rid herself of the memory of Angela Ziegler.

The conversation that ended their official relationship plays in her head like a loop.

_I can’t be with someone like you._

_What…? Angela, what are you saying? Why not?_

_Because you have no regard for human life._

“Fuck you!”

The same familiar, sudden sound of glass shattering reached Moira’s ears.

How many pieces of equipment had she ruined in her frustration? How many times had her arms swept off the contents of her table, loud and inconsequentially? How many beakers and chemicals had been splashed onto the floor of her laboratory?

“Angela…ugh! Fuck you!”

_No regard for human life? Please. I just want to further it, and you’re too conventional to see that._

_I’d rather be too conventional than hurt those I want to protect._

But where was the _allure_ of conventional healing? That was always what had hung Moira up from becoming a fully-fledged, purely benevolent doctor. She was a medic, a scientist, and frankly – as the public had described her so often in their fervour – either a madwoman or a genius. Moira always smirked when she thought of the former mixed with the latter. Bedfellows indeed. She was more than happy to be both if it brought the human race greatness.

But the thing that always hung Moira up the most about Angela was her _touch_. The ways that she used to look at her. The sensation of butterflies and bats and ocean waves that used to sweep over her stomach in a fit of love, bursting at stitched up seams inside her lungs.

Moira O’Deorain was _more_ than capable of compassion; she was capable of love. It was just that she only showed it to a few people. Did this make her an inherently bad person? To want to push the boundaries of medicine and medical science, to further evolve the human race into what it could be?

In her mind, it certainly did not. In Angela’s, it did the opposite.

The thoughts that haunt Moira late at night are usually peppered by the memories of their kisses. The gentle moments where they used to lay in the ambience; beneath their dark cotton sheets, in the dust-speckled lighting of their dormitory rooms, intermingled between each other’s legs, locked fingers and sweeps through each other’s hair. Their tenure with each other unignorably present, and their mutual admiration for one another shining through in a constant beacon of adoration. Angela would often complement Moira’s complexion in the lighting of the dawn, how handsome she thought she was; how her red hair was like a flame that burned almost endlessly inside her heart.

Moira had never felt the kinds of ways that Angela had made her feel, and that was something that both infuriated and fascinated her all at once. She knew that she loved her.

The intimacy was much the same. The intensity of it all. The ways that once they got started, they didn’t stop, and neither one of them wanted to. At night, Moira remembers Angela’s curves the most; the ways that her palms could glide along the shape of her body, the sensation of Angela’s breasts against her hands, her thighs tightly wound against her waist. To feel Angela’s laboured breaths against her ear, to feel the moans vibrate against her lips whilst they kissed in between fucking; she could think of nothing better. Nothing compared. It was something that even Moira O’Deorain couldn’t find a cure for.

She wondered sometimes if Angela felt the same. If their core values had been different, if they had been the same as each other’s, would they still be together? Moira knew she still would want to be with Angela. Hell, she still did, even now. It was never a question of whether or not she wanted to let go of the doctor that had so thoroughly captured her heart.

It was a question of being unable to convince Angela Ziegler that medicine _needed_ to progress; and that she was going to do it; with or without her.

And so, for both women, tonight is a familiar scene. Moira has done it a million times before. She cleans up the messes she made in the laboratory, and before she knows it, the phone is in her hand, and Angela’s number is punched in. She’ll hesitate, but knows she’ll call, and she knows that Angela will pick up, that she’ll come over, they’ll fuck, hard, and then she’ll leave. It’s almost as though Angela keeps her at an arm’s length as though that’s somehow still adhering to her morals, to her own personal stance of protecting the people, when really, Moira knows that Angela is the biggest hypocrite she knows.

_Angela, your hypocrisy is unflattering._

_My hypocrisy?_

_Yes. You talk as though you don’t do anything to alter the fabric of human life. But don’t you bring people back from the dead?_

Moira smirks at remembering Angela’s aghast expression.

_I – that’s different, and you know it!_

_How is it, pet? Tell me. In what way is necromancy different to what I’m doing?_

Her smirk fades. Her eyes darken.

_Because I give them their life back – not drain it from them for my own gain!_

But Moira knows that Angela’s hypocrisy will always keep her coming back. It won’t stop either of them from sleeping in the same bed tonight. It won’t stop their momentum of loving one another, of still admiring each other, or pretending that everything is fine. It won’t stop the sensation of those late nights where they miss one another either, and Moira knows that.

She’s going to do everything in her power to make sure that Angela Ziegler stays hers; be it from a distance or pressed up against her.

And Moira O’Deorain knows that better than anyone.

**Author's Note:**

> if you enjoyed this, then i'm happy to say i just finished writing my first game as part of Noodletub Games - and it's out on Steam right now! it's called The Ghost of You. if you want to sink your teeth into a suspense-horror-love story about an entirely lesbian cast, then please check it out [here](https://noodletub.tumblr.com/post/181306988281/the-ghost-of-you-out-now-on-steam)! thank you so much! ♥


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